Apple iOS App Pocket Doorbell: For Dumbbells (review)

Our Phil Baker pans the iOS app Pocket Doorbell — it’s not even worth the 99 cents it’ll set you back, he said. Let us know what you think.

The Pocket Doorbell app for the iPhone is the app that you never knew you needed — until you saw it. And then you realize you were right the first time.

No wonder the Apple App Store has 585,000 apps — a lot of them are just silly or dumb. This is one. The first 10 reviewers all liked it — they all wrote similar single-line reviews with five stars in the first two days after it came out. They’re probably insiders trying to game the ratings.

The Pocket Doorbell app displays a doorbell on the screen that you can use to “ring” when you arrive at someone’s home. It accesses your address book to connect your location, via your iPhone’s GPS, with your friend’s address. It then displays your friend’s contact information. But of course your address book needs to have the friend’s full address for this to work.

Bottom line: It’s one of the most useless apps I’ve ever seen. It’s a doorbell for dumbbells. And by dumbbells, I mean anyone who would shell out 99 cents for this silly app. Avoid!

5 Comments

As the press release points out, sometimes you get to someone’s house and they want you to call them so they can let you in or talk to you.

This means you pull up your Contacts app, scroll down or seach for the contact, then call.

This app hooks your contact list to your GPS; when arrive, instead of pulling up your contact list, you fire up this app, push the “doorbell”, and it knows whose house you’re in front of (from the GPS, if you’ve entered their address of course). And it calls.

Saves a step. Actually, more than that because looking up on a contact list, especially a long one with complex entries, it more than a one-step process. It’s neat if your phone already knows where you are — so why not skip the middleman and take you right to the contact – press the ‘doorbell’ to make the call.

It’s weird-dumb at first glance. But I wonder if it’s not actually kinda cute, and just useful enough to be interesting?